ABSTRACT
We have already analyzed a major political documentary, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. We took notice of an even earlier political film, the little 1896 film of candidate William McKinley crossing the lawn in front of his house. In post-revolutionary Russia, Dziga Vertov was making and mixing newsreels, politics, and his own point of view, culminating in The Man with the Moving Camera (1929), a celebration of the “Kino Eye,” the all-seeing, all-creating, probing eye of documenting cinema. The modern American political documentary can be seen in Robert Drew’s Primary (1960), which, with minimum commentary, follows John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey as they cross the country seeking the Democratic nomination for President. It was an important entry in what came to be called cinéma vérité, documentary filmmaking that allows events to play out in front of the camera with minimum interference by the filmmakers and minimum guidance for the viewer save what is seen and heard on the screen. And there is Emile d’Antonio Point of Order, a collation of found footage of the Army–McCarthy hearings. This may be the ultimate in cinéma vérité, something like a second-degree documentary, taking television footage, itself an all but passive recording of the hearings, and editing it into a commentary-free exposé of rancid political theater. Cinéma vérité was never quite what it pretended to be because of the simple fact of editing. The most non-obtrusive footage (it can be argued that no footage is non-obtrusive, since the very presence of a camera changes the way people behave) still has to be put together to form a narrative. And a narrative, by definition, tells a story, and any story has a point of view.
